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History 1450-1789: Women

As they have in all the world's cultures, women made up about half the population in early modern Europe, and their experiences were thus nearly as varied as those of men. Like those of men, women's experiences differed according to social class, geographic location, religious affiliation, ethnicity, and rural or urban setting. The life of Queen Elizabeth of England—probably the most powerful and famous woman from this period—was far more like that of her male relatives than like that of a peasant woman in Poland or the Ottoman Empire, or even a peasant woman on one of Elizabeth's own estates. She was highly educated, spoke many languages, held legitimate authority over many people, ate well, and lived quite comfortably, while peasant women—and men—had none of these advantages.

The great changes of the period had widely varying effects on women, creating greater opportunities for some women in some places while lessening opportunities for other women elsewhere. The expansion of rural cloth production, for example, created better-paying work for single women in parts of France, but lessened the demand for cloth made by married Irish women. Leaders of the Protestant Reformation supported teaching girls to read the Bible, but also advocated the closing of convents that provided a place where learned women could study and teach. Urban women in western Europe were increasingly able to obtain cheaper and more diverse consumer goods, but these were often produced in Europe's overseas colonies by men and women working in horrific conditions.

Despite this variety, however, all women in Europe lived in a society that regarded women as inferior to men. This idea undergirded and shaped legal systems, family relationships, inheritance patterns, religious doctrine and institutions, educational opportunities, and structures of work throughout all of Europe. Even Queen Elizabeth was not excluded from this, for her life—and the course of English history—would have been very different had she been a man. Many women, from Queen Elizabeth on down, were able to shape their lives to a great extent despite restrictive ideas and systems, but their actions did not upset the underlying hierarchy of gender. This essay will first examine trends in the way that women's history of the early modern period has been conceptualized and studied, and then explore three realms of life that were especially important in shaping early modern women's situation and experiences: legal systems, work, and religious life.

Early Modern Women's History

Intensive study of women in the early modern period, as in most periods, began in the 1970s by asking what women contributed to developments regarded as central to the period, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the development of capitalism, the creation of colonial empires, or the rise of the centralized state: Who were the great women artists/musicians/scientists/rulers? How did women's work serve capitalist expansion? What was women's role in political movements such as the English Civil War or other seventeenth-century revolts? Along with this, historians investigated what effects the developments of the early modern period had on women: What was the impact of the Reformation on women's lives? How did the scientific revolution or the Enlightenment shape ideas about women's place? What new products or opportunities were offered to women because of overseas empires?

Both these original lines of questioning continue, particularly for parts of Europe or groups of women that were slower to be studied, such as eastern Europe, Jewish women, or peasant women. They have been augmented more recently by quite different types of questions, as historians have realized the limitations of simply trying to fit women into historical developments largely derived from the male experience (an approach rather sarcastically described as "add women and stir"). Such questions often center on women's physical experiences—menstruation, pregnancy, motherhood—and the ways in which women gave meaning to these experiences, and on private or domestic matters, such as friendship networks, family devotional practices, or unpaid household labor. Because so little of this was documented in public sources during the early modern period, this research has required a great amount of archival digging and the use of literary and artistic sources.

To these older and newer lines of inquiry historians have also added questions about the symbolic role of gender, that is, how qualities judged masculine and feminine are differently valued and then used in discussions that do not explicitly relate to men and women, but that still reinforce women's secondary status. Investigations of the real and symbolic relations between gender and power have usually not been based on new types of sources, but have approached some of the most traditional types of historical sources—political treatises, public speeches by monarchs, state documents, religious tracts, and sermons—with new questions.

Taken together, these investigations have resulted in hundreds of books and thousands of articles on many aspects of the lives of early modern women. This is still far less, of course, than the number of books and articles on men, but it has created a much more complex—and interesting—picture than historians of women could have imagined thirty years ago and has changed the way we view many features of early modern life.

Law and Legal Systems

Traditional medieval law codes in Europe accorded women a secondary legal status, based generally on their inability to perform feudal military service; the oldest legal codes required every woman who was not married to have a male legal guardian who could undergo such procedures as trial by combat or trial by ordeal for her. This gender-based guardianship gradually died out in the later Middle Ages as court proceedings replaced physical trials, and unmarried women and widows generally gained the right to hold land on their own and to appear in court on their own behalf. In most parts of Europe, unmarried women and widows could make wills, serve as executors for the wills of others, and serve as witnesses in civil and criminal cases, though they could not serve as witnesses to a will.

Limitations on women's legal rights because of feudal obligations thus lessened in the late Middle Ages, but marriage provided another reason for restricting women's legal role. Marriage was cited as the key reason for excluding women from public offices and duties, for their duty to obey their husbands prevented them from acting as independent persons; the fact that an unmarried woman or widow might possibly get married meant that they, too, were included in this exclusion. A married woman was legally subject to her husband in all things; she could not sue, make contracts, or go to court for any reason without his approval, and in many areas of Europe could not be sued or charged with any civil crime on her own. However, Russian law codes and Islamic law in the Ottoman Empire recognized women's right to sue and be sued as well as certain property and inheritance rights. In many parts of Europe, all goods or property that a wife brought into a marriage and all wages she earned during the marriage were considered the property of her husband, a situation that did not change legally until the nineteenth century.

The husband's control of his wife's property could be modified somewhat by a marriage contract that gave her legal ownership of the dowry she brought into the marriage, or, in some cities, by her declaring herself unmarried (femme sole) for legal purposes, such as borrowing and loaning money or making contracts. In the sixteenth century, wives were also gradually allowed to retain control over some family property if they could prove that their husbands were squandering everything through drink, gambling, or bad investments. In addition to these exceptions provided through law codes, it is clear from court records that women often actively managed their dowry property and carried out legal transactions without getting special approval. The proliferation of exceptions and the fact that women were often able to slip through the cracks of urban law codes began to bother jurists who were becoming educated in Roman law with its goals of comprehensiveness and uniformity. Roman law also gave them additional grounds for women's secondary legal status, for it based this not on feudal obligations or a wife's duty to obey her husband but on women's alleged physical and mental weaknesses, their "fragility, imbecility, irresponsibility, and ignorance," in the words of Justinian's sixth-century code. Along with peasants and the simpleminded, women were regarded as not legally responsible for all of their own actions and could not be compelled to appear before a court; in all cases their testimony was regarded as less credible than a man's. These ideas led jurists in many parts of Europe to recommend, and in some cases implement, the reintroduction of gender-based guardianship; unmarried adult women and widows were again given male guardians and were prohibited from making any financial decisions, even donations to religious institutions, without their approval. In many parts of Europe, women lost the right of guardianship over their own children if they remarried.

Increasing restrictions on unmarried and married women continued throughout the early modern period. In 1731, for example, the Paris Parlement passed the Ordonnance des donations, which reemphasized the power of the husband over the wife; its provisions limiting women's legal rights later became part of the Code Napoléon of the early nineteenth century. The fact that court records show that fewer and fewer women appeared on their own behalf indicates that male guardianship was enforced. Governments generally became less willing to make exceptions in the case of women, as they felt any laxness might disrupt public order.

The spread of Roman law thus had a largely negative effect on women's civil legal status in the early modern period because of both the views of women that jurists chose to adopt from it and the stricter enforcement of existing laws to which it gave rise. Its impact on criminal law was less gender-specific, as was criminal law itself. In general, women throughout Europe were responsible for their own criminal actions and could be tortured and executed just like men. Women were often executed in a manner different from men, buried alive or drowned instead of being beheaded, largely because city executioners thought women would faint at the sight of the sword or ax and make their job more difficult. In Germany, a wife was often included in her husband's banishment for criminal actions—including banishment for adultery!—while the opposite was not the case. In Russia under Ivan the Terrible (ruled 1547–1584), the execution of a husband or father usually meant death for the victim's wife and children as well.

Along with concepts of feudal obligation, wifely obedience, and Roman law, one additional idea was essential in shaping women's legal rights in early modern Europe—the notion of honor. Honor in this period was highly gender-specific, and for women, honor was largely a sexual matter. In most parts of Europe, women of all classes were allowed to bring defamation suits to court for insults to their honor, and it is clear from court records that they did this. Because of ideas of female sinfulness, irrationality, and weakness, however, women, particularly those in the middle and upper classes, were never regarded as able to defend their own honor completely without male assistance. Lower-class women might trade insults or physically fight one another, but middle- and upper-class women were expected to internalize notions of honor and shame and shape their behavior accordingly, depending on male relatives to carry out any public defense of their honor.

Work

Though the actual work that men and women performed in the early modern economy was often very similar or the same, their relationships to work and their work identities were very different. Male work rhythms and a man's position in the economy were to a large degree determined by age, class, and training, with boys and men often moving as a group from one level of employment to the next. Female work rhythms were also determined by age and class, but even more so by individual biological and social events such as marriage, motherhood, and widowhood, all of which were experienced by women individually and over which they might have little control. Women often changed occupations several times during their lives or performed many different types of jobs at once, so that their identification with any one occupation was not strong.

Women rarely received formal training in a trade, and during the early modern period many occupations were professionalized, setting up required amounts of formal training and a licensing procedure before one could claim an occupational title. Thus in the Middle Ages both male and female practitioners of medicine were often called "physicians," but by the sixteenth century, although women still healed people, only men who had attended university medical school could be called "physicians." This professionalism trickled down to occupations that did not require university training; women might brew herbal remedies, but only men could use the title "apothecary." Professionalization did not simply affect titles, but also the fees people could charge for their services; a university-trained physician, for example, could easily make ten times the annual salary of a female medical practitioner.

During the early modern period, gender also became an important factor in separating what was considered skilled from what was considered unskilled work. Women were judged to be unfit for certain tasks, such as glass cutting, because they were too clumsy and "unskilled," yet those same women made lace or silk thread, jobs that required an even higher level of dexterity than glass cutting. The gendered notion of work meant that women's work was always valued less and generally paid less than men's. All economies need both structure and flexibility, and during the early modern period these qualities became gender-identified: male labor provided the structure, so that it was regulated, tied to a training process, and lifelong; female labor provided the flexibility, so that it was discontinuous, alternately encouraged or suppressed, not linked to formal training, and generally badly paid. Women's work was thus both marginal and irreplaceable.

Despite enormous economic changes during the early modern period, the vast majority of people in almost all parts of Europe continued to live in the countryside, producing agricultural products for their own use and for the use of their landlords. Agricultural tasks were highly, though not completely, gender-specific, though exactly which tasks were regarded as female and which as male varied widely throughout Europe. These gender divisions were partly the result of physical differences, with men generally doing tasks that required a great deal of upper-body strength, such as cutting grain with a scythe; they were partly the result of women's greater responsibility for child care, so that women carried out tasks closer to the house that could be more easily interrupted for nursing or tending children; they were partly the result of cultural beliefs, so that women in parts of Norway, for example, sowed all grain because people felt this would ensure a bigger harvest. Whatever their source, gender divisions meant that the proper functioning of a rural household required at least one adult male and one adult female; remarriage after the death of a spouse was much faster in the countryside than in the cities. Women's labor changed as new types of crops and agricultural products were introduced and as agriculture became more specialized. Women in parts of Italy, for example, tended and harvested olive trees and grape vines, and carried out most of the tasks associated with the production of silk: gathering leaves from mulberry trees, raising the silk cocoons, and processing cocoons into raw silk by reeling and spinning. Women also worked as day laborers in agriculture; from wage regulations, we can see that female agricultural laborers were to be paid about half of what men were, and were also to be given less and poorer quality food.

Women also found work in rural areas in nonagricultural tasks, particularly in mining in central Europe and by the sixteenth century in domestic industry. In mining, women carried ore, wood, and salt, sorted and washed ore, and prepared charcoal briquets for use in smelting. In domestic industry, they produced wool, linen, and later cotton thread or cloth (or cloth that was a mixture of these), and were hired by capitalist investors, especially in parts of France, southern Germany, and northern Italy, as part of a household or as an individual. In areas of Europe where whole households were hired, domestic industry often broke down gender divisions, for men, women, and children who were old enough all worked at the same tasks; labor became a more important economic commodity than property, which led to earlier marriage, weaker parental control over children, and more power to women in family decision making. In parts of Europe where women were hired as individuals, men's agricultural tasks were more highly paid, so men continued to make most of the decisions in the family, and there was little change in women's status.

In the cities, domestic service was probably the largest employer of women throughout the period. Girls might begin service as young as seven or eight, traveling from their home village to a nearby town. Cities also offered other types of service employment on a daily or short-term basis. Many of these jobs were viewed as extensions of a woman's functions and tasks in the home—cleaning, cooking, laundering, caring for children and old people, nursing the sick, preparing bodies for burial, mourning the dead. The hospitals, orphanages, and infirmaries run by the Catholic Church were largely staffed by women, as were similar secular institutions that many cities set up beginning in the fifteenth century. In most parts of Europe, women continued to dominate midwifery, the one female occupation whose practitioners developed a sense of work identity nearly as strong as that of men.

The city marketplace, the economic as well as geographic center of most cities, was filled with women; along with rural women with their agricultural and animal products there were city women with sausage, pretzels, meat pies, cookies, candles, soap, and wooden implements they had made. Women sold fresh and salted fish that their husbands had caught or that they had purchased from fishermen, game and fowl they had bought from hunters, and imported food items such as oranges, and, in the eighteenth century, tea and coffee bought from international merchants. Women also ran small retail establishments throughout the city. They made beer, mead, and hard cider, and ran taverns and inns to dispense their beverages and provide sleeping quarters for those too poor to stay in the more established inns. Among Muslim populations in Ottoman urban centers, a number of women vendors, many of them Christians and Jews, catered to upper-class harem women.

Domestic industry provided employment for increasing numbers of urban as well as rural women, particularly in spinning. Early modern techniques of cloth production necessitated up to twenty carders and spinners per weaver, so that cloth centers like Florence, Augsburg, or Antwerp could keep many people employed. The identification of women and spinning became very strong in the early modern period, and by the seventeenth century unmarried women in England came to be called "spinsters."

Women increasingly turned to spinning as other employment avenues were closed to them, particularly in craft guilds, which continued to dominate the production and distribution of most products throughout the early modern period. There were a few all-female guilds in cities with highly specialized economies such as Cologne, Paris, and Rouen, but in general the guilds were male organizations and followed the male life cycle. One became an apprentice at puberty, became a journeyman four to ten years later, traveled around learning from a number of masters, then settled down, married, opened one's own shop, and worked at the same craft full-time until one died or got too old to work any longer. Women fit into guilds much more informally, largely through their relationship to a master as his wife, daughter, or domestic servant. Masters' widows ran shops after the death of their husbands, and were expected to pay all guild fees, though they could not participate in running the guild. As the result of economic decline, the competition of rural and urban proto-industrial development, the increasingly political nature of the guilds, and notions of guild honor, even this informal participation began to be restricted in the fifteenth century on the Continent, however, and women largely lost this relatively high-status work opportunity.

Religion

In Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, the early modern period was a time when the domestic nature of women's acceptable religious activities was reinforced. The proper sphere for the expression of women's religious ideas was a household, whether the secular household of a Jewish, Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, or Muslim marriage, or the spiritual household of an enclosed Catholic or Orthodox convent. Times of emergency and instability, such as the expulsion of the Jews and Muslims from Spain, the first years of the Protestant Reformation, the English Civil War, or the Schism Crisis in Russia, offered women opportunities to play a public religious role, but these were clearly regarded as extraordinary by male religious thinkers and by many of the women who wrote or spoke publicly during these times. Women who were too assertive in expressing themselves during more stable times, or who were too individualistic in their ideas, risked being termed insane or being imprisoned by religious or secular courts.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all contain strong streaks of misogyny and were in the early modern period totally controlled by male hierarchies with the highest (or all) levels of the clergy reserved for men. In all three, God is thought of as male, the account of Creation appears to ascribe or ordain a secondary status for women, and women are instructed to be obedient and subservient; all three religious traditions were used by men as buttresses for male authority in all realms of life, not simply religion. Nevertheless, it was the language of religious texts, and the examples of pious women who preceded them, that were used most often by women to subvert or directly oppose male directives.

Before the Reformation in western Europe and throughout the early modern period in eastern Europe, the most powerful and in many ways independent women in Christianity were the abbesses of certain convents, who controlled large amounts of property and often had jurisdiction over many subjects. Convents had widely varying levels of religious devotion and intellectual life; many were little more than dumping grounds for unmarriagable daughters, while others were important centers of piety and learning. In the fifteenth century many underwent a process of reform designed to enforce strict rules of conduct and higher standards of spirituality. These reforms put convents more closely under the control of a local male bishop, taking away some of the abbess's independent power, but also built up a strong sense of group cohesion among the nuns and gave them a greater sense of the spiritual worth of their lives. In addition to living in convents, a number of women in the late Middle Ages lived in less structured religious communities, supporting themselves by weaving, sewing, or caring for the sick.

Like Christianity itself, the Protestant Reformation both expanded and diminished women's opportunities. The period in which women were most active was the decade or so immediately following an area's decision to break with the Catholic Church, or while this decision was being made. In Germany and many other parts of Europe, that decision was made by a political leader—a prince, duke, king, or city council—who then had to create an alternative religious structure. During this period, many groups and individuals tried to shape the new religious institutions. Sometimes this popular pressure took the form of religious riots, in which women and men destroyed paintings, statues, stained-glass windows, or other objects that symbolized the old religion, or protected such objects from destruction at the hands of government officials; in 1536 at Exeter in England, for example, a group of women armed with shovels and pikes attacked workers who had been hired by the government to dismantle a monastery. Sometimes this popular pressure took the form of writing, when women and men who did not have formal theological training took the notion of the "priesthood of all believers" literally and preached or published polemical religious literature explaining their own ideas.

Women's preaching or publishing religious material stood in direct opposition to the words ascribed to St. Paul (1 Timothy 2:11–15), which ordered women not to teach or preach, so that all women who published felt it necessary to justify their actions. Once Protestant churches were institutionalized, polemical writings by women (and untrained men) largely stopped. Women continued to write hymns and devotional literature, but these were often published posthumously or were designed for private use. Women's actions as well as their writings in the first years of the Reformation upset political and religious authorities. Many cities prohibited women from even getting together to discuss religious matters, and in 1543 an act of Parliament in England banned all women except those of the gentry and nobility from reading the Bible; upper-class women were also prohibited from reading the Bible aloud to others.

Once the Reformation was established, most women expressed their religious convictions in a domestic, rather than public, setting. They prayed and recited the catechism with children and servants, attended sermons, read the Bible or other devotional literature if they were literate, served meals that no longer followed Catholic fast prescriptions, and provided religious instruction for their children. Women's domestic religion frequently took them beyond the household, however, for they gave charitable donations to the needy and often assisted in caring for the ill and indigent. Such domestic and charitable activities were widely praised by Protestant reformers as long as husband and wife agreed in their religious opinions. If there was disagreement, however, most Protestants generally urged the wife to obey her husband rather than what she perceived as God's will.

The Protestant rejection of celibacy had a great impact on female religious, both cloistered nuns and women who lived in less formal religious communities. In most areas becoming Protestant, monasteries and convents were closed; nuns got very small pensions and were expected to return to their families. In parts of Germany where convents had long been powerful, nuns became the most vocal and resolute opponents of the Protestant Reformation; the nuns' firmness combined with other religious and political factors to allow many convents to survive for centuries as Catholic establishments within Protestant territories or even as Lutheran institutions, redefined as educational centers for young women.

The response of the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation is often described as two interrelated movements, a Counter-Reformation that attempted to win territory and people back to loyalty to Rome and prevent further spread of Protestant ideas, and a reform of abuses and problems within the Catholic Church that had been recognized as problems by many long before the Protestant Reformation. Women were actively involved in both movements, but their actions were generally judged more acceptable when they were part of a reform drive; even more than the medieval crusades, the fight against Protestants, which was generally couched in very military language and could involve secret missions into "enemy" territory, was to be a masculine affair. Women who felt God had called them to oppose Protestants directly through missionary work, or to carry out the type of active service to the world in schools and hospitals that the Franciscans, Dominicans, and the new orders like the Jesuits were making increasingly popular with men, were largely opposed by the church hierarchy. The Council of Trent, the church council that met between 1545 and 1563 to define what Catholic positions would be on matters of doctrine and discipline, reaffirmed the necessity of cloister for all women religious, though enforcement of this decree came slowly. The only active apostolate left open to religious women was the instruction of girls, and that only within the convent. No nuns were sent to the foreign missions for any public duties, though once colonies were established in the New World and Asia cloistered convents quickly followed.

Some analysts see the period of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as a time when western European religion was feminized, as large numbers of people turned to groups that emphasized personal conversion, direct communication with God, and moral regeneration. Many of these groups were inspired by or even founded by women, and had a disproportionate number of women among their followers. Women prophesied, published religious works, and even occasionally preached during the English Civil War, and also organized prayer meetings and conventicles in their houses. Quaker women preached throughout England and the English colonies in the New World, and were active as missionaries also in Ireland and Continental Europe well into the eighteenth century. Jansenism, a movement primarily within the French Catholic Church that emphasized personal holiness and spiritual renewal, attracted many women, and the convent of Port-Royal in Paris became the movement's spiritual center. In Germany, Pietism developed as a grass-roots movement of lay people who met in prayer circles and conventicles, among which were many women.

Judaism and Islam were minority religions in western Europe and Russia in the early modern period, and Jewish and Muslim women, along with men, were often the targets of persecution. Jewish women as well as men were questioned, tortured, physically punished, and in some cases executed by the Inquisition in Spain, leading Jews in other parts of Europe to make special efforts to help women of Jewish ancestry leave Spain and Portugal. Jewish women were excluded from public religious life, but they did have specific religious duties relating to the household and special prayers to say when they carried out these duties. Like Jewish women, Spanish Muslim women (termed "Moriscas") carried out religious rituals in their homes and taught them to their children. According to the records of the Inquisition, Moriscas observed the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, performed daily prayers, hid religious books and amulets written in Arabic in their clothing and furniture, taught Muslim ideas and practices to Christian women who married Muslim men, and organized funerals, weddings, and other ceremonies.

Women's lives involved much more than legal systems, work, and religious life, of course, but it is as impossible to cover all aspects of their lives in a relatively brief article as it would be those of men's lives. In fact, including a separate article on women—without a corresponding article on men—goes to some degree against recent research, which has emphasized the diversity more than the commonalities in women's experience across Europe. Even the experience of the relatively small group of women who held political power was diverse. Elizabeth I's situation was very different from that of queen mothers in France such as Marie de Médicis, female rulers of eastern Europe such as Maria Theresa, tsarinas such as Catherine the Great, or mothers of the sultans (known as the valide-sultan) in the Ottoman Empire. Thus perhaps the only generalization safe to make is that gender shaped the lives of all early modern Europeans in complex ways, and that every development of the period was shaped by, and in turn shaped, ideas about or structures of gender.

Bibliography

Amussen, Susan D., and Adele Seeff, eds. Attending to Early Modern Women. Newark, Del., 1998.

Bennett, Judith. Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600. New York, 1996.

Cohn, Samuel K., Jr. Women in the Streets: Essays On Sex and Power in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore, 1996.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives. Cambridge, Mass., 1995.

Davis, Natalie Zemon, and Arlette Farge, eds. Renaissance and Enlightenment Paradoxes. Vol. 3 of A History of Women in the West, edited by Georges Duby and Michelle Perrot. Cambridge, Mass., 1993.

Gowing, Laura. Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford, 1996.

Hafter, Daryl M., ed. European Women and Preindustrial Craft. Bloomington, Ind., 1995.

Hufton, Olwen. The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe. London, 1995.

King, Margaret. Women of the Renaissance. Chicago, 1991.

Kuehn, Thomas. Law, Family, and Women: Toward a Legal Anthropology of Renaissance Italy. Chicago, 1992.

Levin, Eve. Sex and Society in the World of the Orthodox Slavs, 900–1700. Ithaca, N.Y., 1989.

Mac Curtain, Margaret, and Mary O'Dowd, eds. Women in Early Modern Ireland, 1500–1800. Edinburgh, 1991.

Marshall, Sherrin, ed. Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds. Bloomington, Ind., 1989.

Mendelson, Sara, and Patricia Crawford. Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720. Oxford and New York, 1998.

Pierce, Leslie. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York, 1993.

Roper, Lyndal. The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg. Oxford, 1989.

Sánchez, Magdalena S., and Alain Saint-Saëns, eds. Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities. West-port, Conn., 1996.

Sperling, Jutta. Convents and the Body Politic in Renaissance Venice. Chicago, 1999.

Stretton, Tim. Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England. Cambridge, U.K., 1998.

Vickery, Amanda. The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England. New Haven, 1998.

Wiesner, Merry E. Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

Wunder, Heide. He Is the Sun, She Is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Cambridge, Mass., 1998.

—MERRY WIESNER-HANKS

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